Translator's note: Man, I wish I could write stuff like this. I guess this is as close as I get.

Monday dawned warm and without rain. Don Aurelio Escovar, dentist without title and very early riser, opened his office at six. He took from a glass case a set of false teeth still set in its plaster mould and arranged a handful of instruments on the table like a display, in order from largest to smallest. He wore a striped, collarless shirt, closed at the top by a gilt button, and his pants were held up by elastic braces. He was rigid and thin, with a look that rarely corresponded to the situation, like that of the deaf.

When he had the things arranged on the table, he pushed the drill toward the dental chair and sat to polish the false teeth. He seemed not to think of what he was doing, but worked obstinately, pedalling the drill, even though he wasn’t using it.

After eight he paused to look at the sky through his window and he saw two pensive buzzards drying themselves in the sun on a ridge of the roof of the house next door. He kept thinking that before lunch it would rain again. The shrill voice of his eleven-year-old son pulled him out of his abstraction.

“Papa.”

“What?”

“The mayor wants you to pull out a molar.”

“Tell him I’m not here.”

He was polishing a gold tooth. He held it at arm’s length and examined it with half-closed eyes. In the waiting room his son shouted.

“He says you are here because he can hear you.”

The dentist continued examining the tooth. Only when he had put it on the table with the other finished work did he say:

“All right.”

He began pedalling the drill again. From the small cardboard box in which he kept the things he was to do, he took a bridge of several pieces and began to polish the gold.

“Papa.”

“What?”

Still he had not altered his expression.

“He says that if you don’t pull his molar he’s going to shoot you.”

Without rushing, with an extremely tranquil motion, he stopped pedalling the drill, moved it away from the chair, and pulled out the lowest drawer of the table. There was the revolver.

“Fine,” he said. “Tell him to come shoot me.”

He turned the chair to face the door, his hand resting on the edge of the drawer. The mayor appeared on the threshold. He had shaved his left cheek, but on the other, swollen and painful, was a beard of five days. The dentist saw in his shrivelled eyes many nights of desperation. He closed the drawer with the tips of his fingers and said softly, “Sit.”

“Good morning,” said the mayor.

“Morning,” said the dentist.

Whilst the instruments were boiling, the mayor put his skull in the headrest of the chair and felt better. He breathed a glacial odour. It was a poor dentist’s office: an old wooden chair, the pedal-powered drill, and a glass case with ceramic bottles. Before the chair, there was a window with a cloth curtain as high as a man. When he felt the dentist come close, the mayor dug in his heels and opened his mouth.

Don Aurelio Escovar moved the mayor’s face toward the light. After observing the infected tooth, he adjusted the jaw with cautious pressure from his fingers.

“It will have to be without anaesthetic,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because you have an abscess.”

The mayor looked him in the eyes.

“It’s okay,” he said, and tried to smile. The dentist did not answer him in kind. He carried the basin of boiled instruments to the worktable and pulled them from the water with cold pincers, still without hurrying. Then he rolled the cuspidor with the tip of his shoe and went to wash his hands in the washbasin. He did everything without looking at the mayor. The mayor did not take his eyes off the dentist.

It was a lower wisdom tooth. The dentist set his feet apart and gripped the tooth with a hot forceps. The mayor held fast to the arms of the chair, pushed down on his feet with all his strength, and felt an icy void in his kidneys, but didn’t so much as admit a sigh. The dentist moved only his wrist. Without resentment, really with a bitter tenderness, he said,

“Here we pay for twenty dead, Lieutenant.”

The mayor felt a crunch of bones in his jaw and his eyes filled with tears, but he didn’t exhale until he no longer felt the tooth. Then he saw it through his tears. It seemed so alien to his pain that he could not comprehend the torture of the previous five nights. Leaning over the cuspidor, sweating, panting, he unbuttoned his tunic and felt for his handkerchief in his pants pocket. The dentist gave him a clean rag.

“Dry your tears,” he said.

The mayor did as he was told. He was trembling. Whilst the dentist was washing his hands, the mayor looked at the crumbling ceiling and a dusty cobweb filled with spider eggs and dead insects. The dentist returned, drying his hands.

“Take it easy,” he said. “And gargle with salt water.”

The mayor stood, took his leave with a peevish military salute and went to the door stretching his legs, without buttoning his tunic.

“Send me the bill,” he said.

“To you or to the city?”

The mayor didn’t look at him. He closed the door and said through the screen,

“It’s the same thing.”

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